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Above is my most recent Blender experiment! To achieve this effect, I created a map layout in ArcPro, then used that image as a texture on the 3D DEM object.
3D Rendered Mountain Ranges!
I'm currently teaching myself how to import DEM rasters into the 3D modeling program, Blender. So far the process has been a bit confusing, but I'm getting the hang of it! The biggest hurdle I had to jump was figuring out how to geoprocess my DEMs so that blender can read them. After a few online tutorials, I figured out that blander will only display the files correctly if they have "NULL" values instead of no data values like "9999". I also figured out that you have to do some raster math for blender to know what Z value to display. This involves making your elevation values correlate to the bit depth of the DEM. In the example below, the bit depth is 16 bit unsigned, meaning that each pixel can display a range of 65535 different values. To correlate my elevation values to bit depth, I used this formula:
After that, It was a matter of importing the image into blender as a plane, and adding modifiers so that blender knew how to display the elevation data. With some more practice and experience in blender, this method of data display could be used to create some super slick map products. Very exciting stuff!
From this...
To this!
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